Author: BossAccount

Makerspaces are communities for people who want to build, modify and learn about things: a robot or a drone, a 3D printer or scanner, using a laser cutter, learning to solder and build electronics, programme a Raspberry Pi, make cosplay costumes, weld metal, communicate on the Internet of things, make an electric bike or wheelbarrow…. or a pair of shoes!

Come and discuss with members of Basingstoke and other local Makerspaces what you want to build and at the same time see some of the equipment and projects they are working on.

We will try to find authoritative speakers on interesting topics, and if and when we find them we will slot them into the programme, with extra publicity for their presentation.

However in the meantime we need to start Making stuff – as that is what we are all here for – and our meetings will be based around that.

In particular we need stuff that can be shown and demonstrated in pop-up spaces in town, or at the Library Tech evening, or as a display in public places like the Library. Or used in the Library SCI-FI Fantasy Evening in November.

So the next meetings will focus on what we can do together and as individuals to demonstrate our capabilities and interests – as well as providing an opportunity to learn off each other. If we can set ourselves design challenges to work on as a group or individually, then the following meetings over summer can provide opportunities to use the meetings as a workshop, to show progress, and exchange ideas, etc.

Projects so far include:

A Demo of minecraft

Twitter Racing

Crafty Robot Racing

Arduino Home Automation applications

Producing a LoRaWAN basestation to be deployed in Basingstoke

Producing some cool LoRa based ideas to run on said basestation – e.g. tracking the location of your chocolate bust of your grandma, or bus location reporting to an app, or child location system

Computer Vision Projects

Making a Pi Robot – from a Kit or from scratch

Some sound demos

A demo of Fusion 360 3D design tools

A demonstration of Electronics Design tools and soldering

Up to you – whatever floats your boat, and whatever you might like to either share with us, or work with others to produce. If it is something that stretches you, and that you might need help with, then so much the better.

If anyone has something that they wouldn’t mind showing us – like Steve did with his 3D scanning / carving project, then bring it in to any of our meetings and showcase it. If you have a slideshow, then let us know, and we can make sure that the necessary screen and projector is there – and advertise the talk, if that is what you want. Or it can be done less formally.

Hopefully we can also bring in different tools occasionally, like the 3D Printer, when there is something to show – and designing interesting/useful stuff to run on it would also be a great thing to Demo at the TECH evening in the Library, of course.

An evening to discuss Arduino projects, whether your a programming expert or couldn’t tell your inputs from your outputs it doesn’t matter as this is an opportunity to come along and learn more, share more and help everyone get more out of it.

This meeting will have a theme of 3D CAD, such as Fusion360. We will attempt to connect to the Cloud, and to demonstrate using Fusion360 but we aren’t certain how well it will work on the night at Four Lanes, as it needs a good internet connection to work really well. But if anyone is using an alternative 3D CAD package and can demonstrate how they use it, then that would be a welcome addition to the night.